Sure Do Like Those Cookies, Sugar
by nicalyse
Summary: What Rachel really wants is for Santana to bake holiday cookies her. One-shot.


When Rachel first came home and announced that she was giving up her veganism, Santana was all for it. Finding shit that her girl wanted to eat was a struggle sometimes, and there are restaurants that they just straight-up couldn't go to because there wasn't anything on the menu that Rachel could eat. And do you know how many things are secretly made with eggs or butter or milk? If Santana never has to read another ingredient label or ask another waiter, "Are you sure this isn't prepared with any dairy?" that'll be totally okay.

Plus, did you know that some sugar is bleached with bone meal from cows and shit? Honestly.

When Santana found out that most of the reason was because Rachel wanted to be able to prepare and enjoy some of the recipes in the handwritten cookbook that her nana gave her the last time they went back to Ohio to visit the family, Santana was fucking ecstatic.

A lot of the vegan baking that Rachel did was good, but her nana's recipes are fucking _unreal_. Santana always thought that pumpkin pie was just pumpkin pie - then she had Nana's pumpkin pie, and..well. She rewarded Rachel with four orgasms before she even let the girl touch her. Santana asks for banana bread (and gets it) every few weeks, and there are strawberry shortcakes all summer and cranberry muffins all through the fall and Parker House rolls whenever they have a special dinner.

Then there are the Christmas cookies.

Santana has never asked why Rachel's Jewish nana had recipes for the best Chrismas cookies on the planet because, frankly, she doesn't give even one fuck as long as Rachel keeps baking them every year.

* * *

><p>Rachel knows how much Santana likes the cookies she makes during the holidays.<p>

Rachel likes making them. She likes the way they make the house smell and how happy people are when you give them a tin of home-baked treats, not to mention the way that Santana's eyes slip closed and she lets out that tiny little moan from the back of her throat every single time she bites into one of Rachel's gingerbread cookies.

What Rachel really wants is for Santana to bake holiday cookies _with_ her.

She's been asking since they moved into their first apartment together four years ago, and she'd hoped that maybe the more traditional (meaning non-vegan) recipes she got from Nana would be more enticing for her girlfriend, but that hadn't panned out.

And all of Santana's arguments against wanting to bake cookies make sense, at least when Rachel looks at it from her point of view. Mixing up the batter isn't terribly exciting, and then there's the time you have to wait for it to chill. Cookies that you have to roll out can, in fact, be sort of finicky, especially things like gingerbread that you have to chill _again_ on the sheet trays before you can bake them off. And having witnessed how easily Santana can burn things like frozen lasagna, Rachel understands how she thinks watching the timer and rotating trays in and out of the oven is unnecessarily tedious.

"Will you at least decorate some with me this year?" Rachel asks.

It's Thanksgiving, and they're lying in the dark in Rachel's childhood bedroom. They always spend Thanksgiving with her dads, and when she's between jobs, they celebrate Christmas with Santana's family. (They're something of a prime example of the perks of an inter-faith relationship, however few those are.) As soon as they get back to the city, Rachel intends to stop at the market and pick up the ingredients she needs to get busy baking.

"Rach," Santana sighs into the darkness.

"Just drizzle some chocolate on the macaroons," she pleads. "Or sprinkle sanding sugar on the gingerbread snowflakes."

"Baby," Santana groans. "I'm still like, dying from the Berry family 'let's make Santana fat' dinner. Can we please not talk about food?"

"Fine. But just think about it?"

Santana doesn't say anything else, but she presses her lips to the back of Rachel's shoulder through her sleep shirt like always, and Rachel falls asleep with her hand resting on her hip over the band of her panties.

* * *

><p>Rachel Berry is a control freak and a perfectionist.<p>

Fuck no, Santana doesn't want to decorate cookies with her crazy ass.

She loves her. She does, really. Part of the reason that their relationship works is because they know these sorts of things about each other. Like, Rachel doesn't talk to Santana in the morning until she's been up for at least and hour and had a cup of coffee (the exception is morning sex, but that isn't really talking), and Santana keeps her ass out of crazy face's kitchen unless it's to make something simple like pasta or toast.

The thing is, Santana can tell how much Rachel wants her to do this cookie thing, and Santana likes to do things that Rachel wants.

Rachel brings it up again as soon as they're back in the city. She ran out to the market as soon as she'd dropped her bags, and now she's putting things away while Santana sits on the counter and sips from a bottle of water. Flying always leaves her really dehydrated.

"Fine," she concedes when Rachel asks about decorating. Again.

Rachel closes the door of the fridge and stands up straight to face Santana. "Really?" She looks way too excited.

"Only something simple that I can't fuck up, Rachel. And you aren't allowed to be bitchy about it."

"I swear," Rachel says quickly, holding up both hands and stepping towards Santana, stopping between her knees and setting her hands on Santana's thighs over her jeans. "I'm so excited."

This will either be totally awesome or a complete fucking disaster.

* * *

><p>Rachel loves baking.<p>

It sounds silly, but she loves the whole process, the measuring and sifting and pouring, and even though she loves her KitchenAid mixer (in raspberry, a birthday gift from Santana, and possibly the best gift she's ever gotten), there's something soothing about things that you mix by hand. She likes the way that the flour feels on her hands and the way cookie dough looks rolled out on the counter, all smooth and perfect. She likes choosing different shapes for different cookies and then cutting them out with the cookie cutters she's been collecting for as long as she can remember.

Now that she's convinced Santana to help her decorate, she considers her options carefully.

Anything that involves piping is entirely out of the question. It takes practice and patience to be good at piping, neither of which Santana has, and if that's where Rachel starts her, decorating is going to end before it can really get started. And even though it was her suggestion in the first place, Rachel is fairly certain that Santana would be offended if all Rachel gave her to do was drizzling melted chocolate over coconut macaroons. Not to mention the fact that Santana doesn't like coconut.

No, she needs to choose something that Santana wants to eat that has decorations that aren't too intricate.

She finally settles on gingerbread snowflakes piped with royal icing and sprinkled with sparkling sugar and sugar cookie Christmas trees that can be embellished however Santana likes. Rachel will do all of the baking, and then they can have a two-woman assembly line where Rachel pipes the icing and Santana adds the sprinkles and things.

This is going to be fantastic.

* * *

><p>Santana wakes up alone on Saturday, and she isn't impressed.<p>

She likes waking up next to Rachel, okay? The girl has a habit of putting her hands on Santana in her sleep, usually on her thigh or her stomach, and even though it's totally innocent, she likes it.

Santana goes looking for Rachel after she stumbles out of the bathroom. Well, she's also looking for coffee, but she's about eighty percent sure that Rachel's going to be in the kitchen, so it's two birds with one stone, really.

Whatever. Logic doesn't happen before caffeine.

She stops in her tracks when she steps into the kitchen and sees that it's set up as Rachel's Anal Retentive Bakery.

At 8:15 on a Saturday morning.

Rachel looks concerned when she sees Santana standing in the doorway. "Oh, honey, I didn't wake you, did I?" she asks, frozen in place with her hands above the canister of flour.

"No. What the fuck are you doing?"

"Baking cookies."

Santana rolls her eyes. Obviously the girl is baking cookies. "Why now?"

Rachel looks almost ashamed when she answers, "Because I woke up thinking about it and I was too excited to wait."

She's off her fucking rocker. Santana loves her crazy ass. "Is there coffee?" she asks instead of commenting on the evidence of Rachel's insanity spread out on the counter.

Rachel pours her a cup just the way that she likes it, with a spoonful of raw sugar and a splash of the soy milk that she got used to after years of dating a vegan chick, and then shoos her out of the kitchen.

"You don't have to worry about the baking," she insists, following Santana back into the bedroom. She needs socks. Rachel likes to keep the apartment a little cooler than Santana likes, as a sacrifice for the environment or whatever, and rather than bitching about it, she's gotten used to wearing socks any time she isn't in bed. (Her house socks are almost all cashmere, gifts from Rachel. She feels guilty about Santana's cold toes, even if she isn't willing to up the thermostat three degrees.) She didn't bother putting any on before she went looking for Rachel, and now she has toesicles.

"I don't want to worry about the baking," Santana counters. Her caffeine hasn't kicked in yet.

Fortunately, Rachel understands Santana's early morning bitchiness and isn't offended. She kisses Santana gently and smiles fondly before she leaves her alone in the bedroom without saying another word.

Santana pulls on a pair of socks and some sweats, then takes her coffee and the book from her nightstand into the living room. She settles herself in on the window seat, which was the thing that sold them on this place when they went looking for a new apartment a few years back. She's cozy there, wrapped up in the blue afgan that her abuela made when her mom was pregnant, looking down on the slushy New York street below their apartment and eating the muffins Rachel brought her. The girl has Christmas music playing in the kitchen, and Santana can hear her singing along while she does the baking thing, the warm, spicy smell of gingerbread filling the apartment after just about an hour.

* * *

><p>Rachel is trying to be realistic about this decorating thing and how long Santana's motivation is going to last, so when she made her gingerbread and sugar cookie dough, she divided each batch into thirds and then froze two of each. She'll thaw them out in a week or two when all of today's cookies are gone.<p>

It takes about an hour to roll and cut and bake off the cookies, leaving the kitchen full of sweet, spicy smells and counters that are only partially covered with cookies cooling on racks and waiting for decoration. She uses the cooling time to mix up icing and set up what she's thinking of as the decorating assembly line, pouring different candy sprinkles and sparkling sugars into individual bowls and arranging them on the breakfast bar so Santana can sit while she decorates.

Santana is so engrossed in the book that she's reading that she doesn't even notice when Rachel comes out into the living room. Rachel takes advantage of the opportunity to just look at her girlfriend. Santana was always beautiful, but back in high school, there was a sharpness about her much of the time, an indefinable edge that kept everyone at arm's length. Being out of Lima did wonders for her, and when they were away from the ridiculous standards that McKinley had imposed on everyone, it was easy for them to become friends.

They became more without either of them being entirely aware of what was happening until it already had. At that point, neither of them saw any point in fighting it.

It hasn't always been easy, and it certainly isn't the way that Rachel pictured herself at this point in her life, but she loves Santana and that's all that really matters.

"Hey," she says quietly, not wanting to startle Santana. "Are you ready to decorate?" she asks brightly when the girl looks up at her.

Santana closes her book and stands up. "Let's do it," she says. Rachel can tell she still isn't entirely convinced, but she loves her for doing this at all.

"You have all sorts of options," Rachel says when Santana's sitting at the breakfast bar. "I'll do the icing, then you can add whatever you want on the trees."

Santana smiles her indulgent, _'okay crazy Rachel'_ smile. "Got it."

"This isn't so bad," Santana admits after a while. Rachel watches her carefully place a little yellow candy sprinkle shaped like a star (she loves them) on the top of a tree cookie. "It's kind of therapeutic."

Rachel bites down on the inside of her lip to keep in the _'I told you so'_, though she doesn't bother to hide her smile.

* * *

><p>Santana is less enthused about the gingerbread snowflakes.<p>

"You just have to press it gently into the sugar," Rachel explains for the third time. She pipes the lines on each snowflake to imitate the way real snowflakes are crystallized, then Santana's job is to turn them upside down into the plate of clear sanding sugar so they sparkle. She hasn't quite picked up the motion yet; she either pushes too hard, squishing out the icing so that it looks fat and sort of clumsy, or doesn't press hard enough, so none of the sugar actually sticks.

Santana tries one more, pressing carefully on the bottom of the cookie after she sets it in the sugar.

Then she picks the thing up and watches a blob of icing and sugar fall off the edge.

"I'm done," she declares, pushing the plate of sugar away.

"It's fine, honey," Rachel says soothingly. "Just try one more-"

"No. No more times," Santana insists firmly. "I did the trees and that was cool, but fuck these snowflakes."

"Santana-"

Rachel stops talking when Santana grabs the piping bag of green icing that she used on the trees and squeezes a blob on the girl's nose. "No more snowflakes."

"_Santana!_"

She can't hold it together any more when the icing falls off Rachel's nose and lands on the front of her pretty blue apron. It's completely silly and really not all that funny, but once she starts laughing, she can't stop.

Until Rachel sinks her hand into a bowl of pearly white nonpareils and tosses them at her face. "No more," she says quickly, staring at Santana with wide eyes. "This stuff is expensive and I don't want to waste it."

"Are you fucking serious right now?" The girl throws shit at her and _then_ tells her to stop?

"Yes! I just wanted you to stop laughing!"

That just makes Santana lose is all over again, and she really can't stop, even with Rachel looking at her all indignant like that. "That backfired, didn't it?" she manages.

Rachel grabs Santana's arm and tugs her off her stool. "Get out of my kitchen," she insists. The way that she's pretending to be mad just makes Santana laugh harder. She's a hell of an actress, but Rachel is a shitty liar; Santana doesn't miss the way that she's biting down on the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.

Santana lets Rachel push her all the way into their bedroom. Naturally, once they're there, she pulls Rachel down onto the bed with her.

"Santana, the cookies," Rachel protests when she pushes her hand up under the side of her sweat shirt.

"Shh." She leans up to kiss the side of Rachel's nose, licking the icing off her lips when she pulls back. "No more cookies."


End file.
